Labor

Abstract

The post-anthropocentric body serves as host to a myriad of flows, forces, metabolisms, behaviours and perhaps performances. ‘Our’ microbiota, the microbes that live upon or within ‘our’ human tissues and fluids, orchestrate these activities. The work of such non-human agents living as ‘micro performers’ on the human epidermis is the focus of my artwork, Labor.

Labor is a dynamic, multi-sensory art installation that endeavours to re-create the scent of human exertion. There are, however, no people involved in making the smell – it is created by bacteria propagating in the three large bioreactors in the artwork. Each bioreactor incubates a species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies. Human sweat in itself is odourless: it is these bacteria feeding upon the components of ‘our’ sweat that creates volatile, odiferous chemical compounds that ‘we’ associate with sweat and physical effort.

Labor reflects upon ‘our’ changing understanding of what ‘we’ are. Microbes in and on the human body vastly outnumber human cells and help regulate many of ‘our’ bodily processes, from digestion and immunity to emotional and physiological responses, like sweating. ‘Our’ microbiota is integral to who and what ‘we’ are, and complicates any simplistic sense of (an indivisible) self. Likewise, the smell of the perspiring body is not just a human scent, unless ‘we’ are willing to redefine what ‘we’ mean by human.

Whereas a traditional, anthropocentric worldview considers all activities of, on and within the human body as unified human activities, a contemporary, post-anthropocentric perspective suggests that humans are not only hosts to other organisms, but that these are collaborative, symbiotic agents of ‘our’ human identity. The artistic research carried out and its resulting artwork Labor charts how coordinated microbial performances across the human epidermis undermine any simplistic sense of a unified, rational, human self.

Notes

1 Apocrine sweat has also been the focus of the work The Smell of Fear (2006) by artist Sissel Tolaas in which she re-creates, via chemical synthesis, the scent of male individuals from different cultural backgrounds, all suffering from severe phobias and unable to bear close proximity with other bodies. In this project, Tolaas not only samples the ‘smell of fear’ and creates a powerful olfactory work but she removes unwanted visual baggage by painting the colourless fluid onto a blank gallery wall. (I discovered the work exhibited at sk-interfaces, curated by Jens Hauser at Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, in 2009.) While I deeply admire Tolaas’s rigorous and ground-breaking work in the area of ‘olfactory art’, throughout more than twenty years of my practice, my focus has been on live-ness, emergence and performativity. It is of crucial importance to me that the scents produced in Labor are not pre-prepared, nor artificial, nor mechanically dispensed. It is important to me that this labour is performed live, it is a living process, and its product is produced far in excess of that which could be created by human toil. Labor should make us ponder the very verb ‘manufacture’, as the human here doesn’t facture, but is factured.

2 Much of my biomedia artwork has playfully undermined gene-centric explanations of human differences. For example, Relative Velocity Inscription Device (2002) is a live experiment in which skin colour genes from my Jamaican/American family members are ‘raced’ against one another in a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) gel to determine our ‘genetic fitness’.